Presenting five poor, black and white North Carolina preteens as they awaken to love and death, George Washington (2000) tells a common adolescent story, yet the film is distinguished by the poetic, ruminative style of its twenty-five-year-old …

Photography, the basis of cinema, is also the foundation of Jan Troell’s Everlasting Moments. The Swedish title of Troell’s feature, his fourteenth, translates as Maria Larsson’s Everlasting Moments, which alludes to the photographs taken by it…

Revanche begins with a reflection of trees in a lake at twilight. They’re seen upside down—an image of nature reversed—yet the earth is eerily calm. This almost otherworldly illusion arouses a viewer’s awareness of perspective, which is then …

Upon its U.S. release in the fall of 1969, Costa-Gavras’s Z made a splash unprecedented for a non-Hollywood film: star Yves Montand talked it up to Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, and the film went on to gross $2.2 million during its first yea…

Costa-Gavras’s 1969 political assassination thriller Z appeared at the end of a decade of burgeoning cultural change and rampant paranoia. In the United States, this Algerian-French coproduction sparked a sensation, not just relaying the European p…

A new era in popular music deserves a new era in filmmaking. That’s the basis of the perfect, fortuitous match-up between rock and cinema in D.A. Pennebaker’s MontereyPop. When Pennebaker and his 16mm filmmaking team came on board to cover the 1…

The Last Metro was the most crowd-pleasing film of François Truffaut’s latter career, sweeping an armload of prizes at France’s Oscar equivalent, the César Awards. It was also as personal a film as he had ever made, and that denotes the film’…

David Lean may not be known primarily for his comedies, but the two he made—1945’s Blithe Spirit, based on the Noël Coward play, and then Hobson’s Choice in 1954—were exceptional, combining expertly timed broad humor with his always refined …

No movie is ahead of its time, just ahead of cultural gatekeepers. Sam Fuller knew this better than any other filmmaker after his 1982 White Dog waited almost ten years to get a theatrical release. Despite Fuller’s career-long penchant for giving c…

The appearance of Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales in the midst of the Sixties’ sexual revolution brought unexpected sobriety to the european sexual drama and the comedy of erotic manners. Their stateside popularity successfully challenged the sauci…

Trouble in Paradise is the most fondly memorable—if rarely seen—Hollywood screwball comedy. Its combination of suaveness, hilarity, and sexiness has had a mighty influence. There would be no Bringing Up Baby, no The Lady Eve, no Pat and Mike, wit…

Before Lars von Trier, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson there was Carl Th. Dreyer. The first great film artist to pursue the ineffable in cinema, Dreyer gave depth to what early silent filmmakers innately underst…

Best known as the major influence on George Lucas’ StarWars, Akira Kurosawa’s 1958 TheHiddenFortress deserves recognition as a definitive cultural expression of Japan’s master filmmaker. After the international success of Rashomon (1952) and…